Ahmedabad, Nov. 5: A 2002 riot witness who had been campaigning against illegal slaughterhouses and accused police of looking the other way was killed this morning by unidentified assailants, three years after he had survived another attack in the same area.

Passers-by found Nadeem Saiyed lying on the ground with 22 stab wounds and throat nearly slit, barely yards from a police post in Juhapura, Gujarat’s largest Muslim ghetto where he had moved after the communal violence nine years ago.

The 39-year-old, recently elected joint convener of the newly formed Gujarat RTI Activists Association, had also taken on Narendra Modi by filing an application seeking information about the chief minister’s trips to Switzerland twice within a short span in 2009. The country is not an investor in the state.

Azazkhan Pathan, a newspaper vendor, said he saw people crowding near a lane. “I heard someone say, ‘he is Nadeem’. I got curious. When I went there, I saw it was my friend Nadeem Saiyed.”

Pathan, who met Saiyed every morning when he came to collect newspapers, said the activist was bleeding but still alive. “It was around 7.30. I called an ambulance and informed the police. After waiting 15 minutes for the ambulance, I put him in an auto and headed for VS Hospital. He died on the way.”

Within hours of the murder, the case was transferred to the crime branch, which has surprised many rights activists, who have planned a protest march in Juhapura tomorrow.

“Is it a new form of encounter?” wondered activist Mukhtar Ahmed, possibly alluding to the encounter cases that have embroiled a former minister and several senior police officers.

“After all, Saiyed was not a widely known figure. Then why has the case been transferred to the crime branch,” asked another activist.

Saiyed, who was seen as an aggressive “Congress” social worker in Juharpura, had last week met police commissioner Sudhir Sinha and complained against what he called a nexus between the police and owners of slaughterhouses.

He told the commissioner that the police had arrested innocent people in connection with an attack on a police team that had visited the Juhapura area to rescue cows from an illegal slaughterhouse.

Sources said he had named a person called Murshid who, according to him, was the real culprit behind illegal slaughterhouses in the area.

Saiyed’s younger brother Washim told the police that those who had attacked his brother three years ago were behind the murder. Saiyed had been attacked near the same police post where he was found today but survived because the attackers had left him thinking he was dead.

The slain social worker, who was a key witness in the Naroda Patia massacre case, had recently told a fellow RTI activist, Bharat Jhala, that he was under threat from the riot accused who were using criminal elements within the minority community to threaten him. Over 90 people were butchered in Naroda Patia on February 28, 2002, a day after the Godhra train fire that triggered the riots.